


Closing Time

by eshtah



Category: Corner Gas
Genre: Adult Content, F/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 19:30:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/116106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eshtah/pseuds/eshtah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow these two have managed to keep a secret in a small town. Except now it's going to end. (OR IS IT? Yes. Yes it is. (For now!)) A sequel to After Hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closing Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [50 Ways to Leave Your Lover](http://skidmo-fic.livejournal.com/54148.html#cutid1) challenge (on LJ).

She’s looking up at his ceiling when she realizes it has to end.

It’s a quiet, sobering epiphany, but once she’s had it, everything around her becomes slightly wrong. His arm, for instance, is snaked around her pelvis, his fingers lifting her right hip from the mattress. It makes her feel trapped. His breath whispers across her left shoulder, tickling her neck. His sheets cling to her, making her feel clammy, out of place, and cheap, though she’d never admit it.

She carefully turns her head to look at his face, which is characteristically blank, even in sleep. For a moment she is torn between his soft face and the voice in her head telling her to leave. She stares at the way his nose wrinkles as he dreams. She longs to lean closer and kiss him up from unconsciousness. But she holds back for a second, and it’s long enough for her awkwardness to reassert itself. She doesn’t belong here anymore, not that she ever did in the first place.

As she lies next to him, her discomfort growing, she realizes there were warning signs. But at the time she didn’t see them for what they were. 

She knows that she’d expected too much from what was supposed to be a tryst. That was why she had to get out. She’d felt something that went beyond what they’d had before.

They’d driven in silence back to his house. No tequila, which was waiting for them in her freezer. No stripping their way up her stairs to fall into her bed. No cuddling in her clean sheets before going again and again.

She thought it would be just as good at his place. In fact, it was better. And that was where the problem lay.

During the silence in the car she had let her hand wander across the seat and then up and over his leg. He had groaned, and she had almost groaned in response. Eight months had been too long.

They got to his place and he helped her out of the truck’s cab. She grabbed his head and practically sucked his face off before her feet hit the ground. Kicking the door shut behind her, she’d pushed him backwards until they hit his front door. He’d tried to protest the treatment of his truck, but she’d slapped him playfully across the face, told him to shut up, and then kissed him again. She had rummaged through his pockets for his keys, letting her fingers linger and stroke until it became all too clear that it was time to move elsewhere.

They had spilled through his front doorway, knocking his mail off of an end table and tripping over a stuffed beaver. Then there was a pause, and she hadn’t known where to go next. In that moment of confusion, Hank had taken her hand, leading her towards his bedroom. Her stomach turned over in excitement, and she had felt young again. Her skin had tingled.

From her retrospective vantage point, she sees that it was the reduced pace and the unusual setting that allowed the change in their relationship to progress. In the past, it had been hot and fast, like neither one wanted to think about what they were doing. They had been driven by a combination of instinct and sexual frustration, which prevented a deeper connection.

But this time their speed had dropped as he led her to his bedroom by the hand, his fingers caressing the space between her own,

She had let him undress her this time. At one point he’d absentmindedly bit his tongue as he wrestled with her belt buckle. It was adorable.

He had picked her up after they were both naked and carried her to his bed. Unlike the last time, and the time before, she let him take his time exploring her body. That had been one of her mistakes. Certainly not the first, but definitely one of the big ones she’d made.

She had arched her back and actually mewed as he worked on her. Slower was definitely better, and so when he finally hovered above her, she’d drawn him in and wrapped her legs around him. They rocked, slowly, for some time. But even when their pace quickened, they never returned to the animalistic, biologically driven roots of their affair.

Afterwards, he fell beside her, exhausted. Instead of turning away to sleep, she had felt compelled to touch him, to still be connected with him. So she did, driven by a feeling she hadn’t been able to identify at the time.

But, waking an hour later, she does realizes what it is. Love.

Fuck.

Fuck _fuck_.

**

Hank is a simple kind of guy. So, in order to extricate herself without waking him, she decides to take the direct, but gentle, approach.

She slides her fingers under his, peeling his arm off of her to lay it beside him. He stirs slightly, and she kisses him softly on the mouth before he can open his eyes. He sighs, but doesn’t wake up.

Carefully, and very, very slowly, she slides off of the bed and onto the floor. She crawls along the edge of the bed, bumping into something unusually pointy and furry, which falls on the ground. Luckily the fur, or whatever it is, muffles the noise. Still, she pops her head over the edge of the mattress to check on Hank. He snores. She goes back to hunting for her clothing.

As she walks along the long road back to Dog River, shivering slightly in the cold, she curses herself for leaving her car at the hotel bar, and for being so naive about their night together. She wipes at the tears that are betraying her outward defences, still in place despite the fact that she’s in the middle of Butt-Fuck Nowhere, Saskatchewan at three in the morning, all alone.

What’s done is done. She can’t let it develop any further, particularly because she’d be the laughingstock of the whole damn town. She turns and can barely see the outline of his house against the sky. Maybe she should have stayed. Town be damned, what if she was supposed to have stayed? She tries to imagine the three of them, Tanner, Hank, and herself, in a cozy family picture. She can’t.

She turns and kicks the gravel at her feet. Besides, love Hank? The man, if you could call him a man, could barely take care of himself. And even more repellent than his hygienic habits and his IQ was the fact that she actually found him attractive, and maybe-not-really-who-am-I-kidding kind of felt more than that.  _So it has to end_ , she tries to convince herself.  _Being in love with an idiot is not an option_.


End file.
